Psychology for Dummies (54 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
While infants are beginning to rely on their reflexes and developing more control over their muscle movements, their brains are developing at an extremely rapid rate. Actually, brain development begins during pregnancy and continues throughout childhood and adolescence. The progression of brain development begins with the motor areas of the brain. Without the necessary brain development in these areas, infants would not be able to respond reflexively and gain control over their bodies. The next stop on brain-development express is the
somatosensory
areas of the brain, the areas involved in sensation and perception (the olfactory, taste, pain, auditory, and visual areas). Infants are born with a good sense of hearing. They can discriminate between their mothers’ voices and strangers’ voices, for example, which may be a result of hearing their mothers’ voices throughout pregnancy. Their senses of smell and taste are also keen. Visual acuity is less developed at birth and gradually develops over the course of their first year of life.
Like a roadmap or template, children use what Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget called schemata, or mental modes of thinking, to represent, organize, and integrate experience.
Schemata
are basic ways of thinking about the world. Rather than sit passively by as the world presents them with information, children actively construct an understanding and mental representation of the world. There are three basic schemata:
Sensorimotor schemata:
These organized patterns of thought are generated from a child’s direct interaction with and manipulation of the objects in their environment.
For example, when a 1-year-old takes everything off of her plate and drops it on the floor, she’s not just trying to annoy her mommy and daddy. According to Piaget, she’s developing a sensorimotor schema to understand the relationship between cause and effect. It’s a simple representation of a basic mechanical relationship: “I drop food. Then, mommy and daddy turn red. This is fun!”
Symbolic schemata:
With the development of these schemata, a child begins to symbolically represent earlier sensorimotor relationships. He can think about the objects in his world without having to directly interact with them.
Operational schemata:
These internal, mental activities involve the manipulation of the symbolic representations of objects. Operational schemata involve the ability to think abstractly and to solve problems without actually having to physically attempt a solution. So, instead of jumping in front of a car to see if it hurts, the child can imagine jumping in front of a car and decide whether it would hurt.
Basically, the three schemata begin with concrete interactions with the world and progress to a more symbolic and abstract thinking process. This is a hallmark of Piaget’s work; remember that we start out with the concrete and then graduate to the abstract. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why I never did well in Sunday school. I couldn’t get past the idea that clouds didn’t seem strong enough to support heaven. Wouldn’t everything fall right through? I still haven’t figured that one out.
We are born with two processes that help further develop thinking:
Organization:
Organization involves combining the different schemata we’ve already developed with new and more complex schemata. It’s like we’re constantly shifting our understanding of the world around us to create a better and more complete picture.
Adaptation:
Adaptation is a process of adjusting our thinking to the demands of our environments. Adaptation is accomplished by two distinct sub-processes:
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Assimilation:
Little kids use assimilation all the time. When little Jimmy calls a horse a “doggy,” that’s assimilation in progress. Children attempt to understand novel objects in their environment by drawing upon what they already know and applying to novel objects and situations, it’s kind of like using a template and the child is trying to fit everything into that one template. If the child only knows one type of four-legged animal with a tail, even a horse is a “doggy.”
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Accommodation:
Accommodation is essentially the opposite process of assimilation. Here, existing schemata are altered to fit the new and novel information. Cognitive growth, then, is the ongoing and persistent process of children applying (assimilating) their understanding to the world and making accommodations for new information. This is the overall process of adaptation, which allows for the maintenance of cognitive equilibrium between thinking and the environment.
Thinking things throughCognitive developmental theory
is the study of the development and maturation of thinking. A Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget is the father and reigning king of cognitive developmental theory. Piaget began thinking about thinking as he watched his own children grow up in front of him, analyzing their behavior and theorizing about the thoughts running through their little heads. I guess having a psychologist for a parent really can be a little scary.Piaget is considered to be a
mentalist:
because his theory holds that our overt behavior is due in a large part to how we think about the world. Piaget emphasized how we think, instead of what we know. A dictionary contains a lot of information, but can it solve the equation 2 + 2? Piaget defined intelligence as the collection of mental abilities that help an organism adapt. He also felt that intelligence involves seeking
cognitive equilibrium
— a harmonious balance between an individual’s thinking and the environment. We constantly encounter novel situations and stimuli from our environment. These new experiences challenge the human mind, which leads to an imbalance. Thinking is the process that restores the balance.
The
sensorimotor stage
is the first stage of cognitive development, and it lasts from birth to 2 years of age. During the sensorimotor stage, the problem- solving abilities of an infant grow beyond simple reflexes. Infants extend reflexive behaviors to novel objects in their environment. An infant may suck on a little toy in addition to his mother’s nipple or the nipple of a bottle. It can take some babies a few tries to get used to sucking on a pacifier until he is able apply his natural-sucking knowledge and ability to other objects.
Almost accidentally, babies discover that they can have a physical effect on the objects in the world. They gradually build on these accidental discoveries and develop intentional and coordinated responses on a simple scale. Eventually, babies progress to a type of experimentation or trial-and-error learning in which they do things to the objects around them just to see what kind of impact they can have on these objects.
The ability to imitate people also develops during the sensorimotor stage. Babies often smile when you smile at them. One of the most common forms of imitation is cooing. When an infant develops the ability to imitate, she often coos back at people who coo at her. That’s so cute!
A final key development in this stage is the development of a skill called
object permanence.
If you hide something from a baby who has not yet developed object permanence, he forgets about it. But, when babies achieve object permanence, they remember that the object is still around even if it’s not in plain sight — they try to look for the object when you conceal it. So, if you’re going to hide things from your children, do it before object permanence develops.